NOVEMBER 2019 PCWorld 59Helios 700 in these results but overall, the
GE65 Raider represents well. It is essentially
as fast as very high-clocked GeForce GTX
1080 laptops that are larger and thicker.BATTERY LIFE: NOT GREAT,
NOT TERRIBLE
Battery life means more on today’s gaming
laptops, as more people demand it and
more models offer better-than-token efforts.
For our test, we loop a 4K video with the
display set at about 250 nits’ brightness (a
good setting for daytime interior
environments) and plug in a pair of earbuds.
We also set the laptop to airplane mode and
turn off the RGB keyboard features.
Battery life is typically dictated by the size of
the battery plus all of the hardware that’s
running. Another major
factor for gaming
laptops specifically is
whether the laptop uses
Nvidia’s G-Sync. G-Sync
requires the GPU to be
connected to the
display, which means
the discrete GPU and its
RAM are turned on the
whole time.
The GE65 Raider,
interestingly, doesn’t
include G-Sync despite
its use of a 240Hz
panel. The high refreshRaytracing API. Again, only laptops based on
the RTX 2080 can beat the GE65 Raider. We
do again see that the GeForce RTX 2080
Max-Q variants pale in comparison.
We also run real-world games. First up
is Rise of the Tomb Raider set to its Very
High setting at 1080p resolution and in
DX11 mode.
Just as we saw in Fire Strike, the older
GeForce GTX 1080 parts spring back into the
mix under DX11 games. One thing you may
notice in the chart: The only laptops that
outpace the GE65 Raider are 17-inch laptops,
which tend to have more space to work with
for thermals.
The last game we ran was Middle-earth:
Shadow of Mordor set to Ultra and at 1080p
resolution. We didn’t have the Acer Predator
The compromised battery capacity hurts the battery life of the GE65 Raider.
M(Core i7-8750H)SI GS75 Stealth
Acer Predator Triton 500 (Core i7-8750H)
M(Core i9-9880H)SI GE65 Raider
Dell G7 (Core i7-9750H)
Alienware M 15
(Core i7-8750H)
Alienware Area 51m R1
(Core i9-9900K)
HP Omen 2XS
(Core i7-9750H) Default4K Video Battery Life
(Minutes)LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE399193274130354134223